Customer Reviews

Horace Afoot

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This book is marketed incorrectly and deserves a wider audience. Such is the fate of a debut writer in the hands of a small independent press. I think more people would read this novel if it were sold as a comic mystery novel - and I mean mystery in the medieval sense. This novel, about a seemingly aimless ponderer of life's absurdities and profundties, is looking for some larger answers to the inexplicable mysteries of everyday life. The catch, and wonderful surprise, in this novel is that Horace(a curmudgeon, at first) undergoes a true epiphany and begins to feel and act like a real human. What changes him? A chance encounter with a naked, amnesiac woman who he saves from an unseen gun-toting rapist. Who is she? Who attacked her? Why was she in a cornfield near the local Indian burial mound? None of these intriguing plot elements are mentioned anyway on the jacket blurb or any of the marketing materials for this book. It seems that the publisher was attempting to sell this very accessible novel to an intellectual, philosophy minded readership. This was a mistake. Reuss' novel is a delight and I was truly surprised by who Harace meets and how he is affected by these encounters in his wandering adventures.

This story held me at arm's length for a bit. The narrator is disconnected, a stranger in a town named Oblivion, no job, with little apparent purpose in life. But I am glad I stayed with it. Horace Afoot has a singular charm. The story develops a unique, pleasing movement once Horace actual connects with someone - the lovingly depicted librarian Mohr - and the 'aboutness' of the tale emerges. I look forward to reading Reuss's new book, 'Henry of Atlantic City'. I have a feeling that Reuss may be one of those authors - Thomas Mallon is another to come immediately to mind - whose story-telling skills grow to match a quietly inventive approach.

Oblivion and autarkeia ("the serenity of not caring") are the underlying themes of Frederick Reuss's first book. The book's narrator, Horace--full name Quintus Horatius Flaccus, a name and identity borrowed from the classical Roman poet of 65-8 B.C.--is an enigmatic self-absorbed individual who is financially independent and in relentless pursuit of the answer to the existential question Who am I?

Unlike Cervante's eccentric hero Don Quixote, Reuss's narrator is the antihero who expends his time re-reading favorite books, recording memorized literary passages and philosophical thoughts, telephoning strangers at anytime of the day or night asking enigmatic questions on a variety of subjects, walking "afoot" (Horace disdains all mechanical transportation) to the Indian burial mound of questionable archaeological significance or to the small airport on the outskirts of his adopted Midwestern town called Oblivion, and rocking endlessly in a chair on the porch of his neglected house.

"I have been rocking on the front porch for three days now, and I have discovered something: time passes, and I enjoy having it pass. Inactivity is no easy accomplishment, and finding pleasure in it means overcoming conditioned reflexes."

Although Horace is indifferent to nearly everyone and everything about him, his unintended interactions with the local sheriff who belligerently questions Horace's eccentric behaviour in an unsolved crime, a dying librarian who befriends Horace and in the process discovers his own life's quest, the earthy young woman recently laid off from the town's defense contractor factory who challenges Horace's repressed sexuality and compassion for others, and the town juvenile punk who threatens Horace's mortal existence all compromise Horace's need for oblivion and give hope that Horace (or William Blake or Lucian of Samosata or ...) finally will answer the Why in his own life.

This first novel is well written; Reuss describes the landscape in and around Obilivion and the characters who inhabit it in spare yet eloquent terms. His protagonist, an affluent and alienated man of middle age who attempts to define his identity through a series of literary personae, gradually begins to connect with the town and people among whom he has chosen to live. Horace (formerly William Blake, eventually Lucian) is an interesting man, and he's lucky to live in a town where the people he calls don't immediately hang up on him. By the end of the book he's beginning to care about the people (and not just what they think), and I am finally beginning to care about him. But as a character he is not particularly engaging until he himself begins to become engaged with others. In a way I am reminded of _The Shipping News_, wherein the character of Quoyle, initially almost monstrous, becomes more and more attractive as he discovers and develops his own loveable humanity. I have to say, though, that while I loved Proulx's novel, _Horace Afoot_ is, in comparison, just ok. It is definitely worth reading, and I will look for future work by the author, but I doubt that I will reread it.

I found Frederick Reuss's books only recently, and as always with a new author, started at the beginning: with Reuss's debut effort from 1997. I've seldom read such an inventive novel, and for this to be Reuss's very first book is simply astounding. "Horace Afoot" is clever & confounding, by turns erudite and straightforward, lyrical and coarse.

The protagonist, Horace -- a man who changes his name each time he changes his philosophy -- is a man without a defined past. The reader is left to imagine how Horace got where the book finds him, and why he does the sometimes odd, even antisocial, things he does. You may not like this prickly, inaccessible character -- I'm not entirely sure I did -- but I guarantee you'll find his journey, his musings and alterations, fascinating and engrossing.

If, as Reuss implies throughout "Horace Afoot," we are who we are in part because of what we read, then I am, today, a bit more enlightened; a touch more open to the wonder of the world around me; and a tad less likely to jump to conclusions than I was before reading this exceptional novel.

The narrator's attempt to live in and react to the world as if he were the person whose name he has currently taken brings a new way of viewing the world, particularly that of a small town and its sometimes bizarre, inextricably inter-related residents.

Some very fine writing, mind you, and entertaining in the way of a walking philosophical chatauqua...but not for an instant did I ever believe in Horace', nee Lucius', nee William Blake's existence. I like quirky characters, but this is no Ignatius J. Reilly. As for the mystery...predictable from seventy-five pages out. The last 10 pages, nearly worthless, far too riddled with epiphanaic resolution. As for the insights scattered throughout the book, not much of it is fresh. Lots of re-hashing going about. I'd suggest picking this book up at the library to see if it's worth the ten bones (for me, it wasn't).

Horace Afoot is a spare, learned and profoundly pleasurable novel whose extraodinary level of craft makes it hard to believe that it is anybody's first. This moving and beautifully dramatized meditation on modern (and perhaps ancient) life reminds me a little of Frederick Dillen's "Hero." The great surprise, once the author establishes the tone and direction at the outset, is his amazing ear for American speech, his sure pacing and dramatic instincts, and his unerring powers of observation. (Horace's descriptions of the world around him are marked by almost excruciating economy and wit.) This book could well become a contemporary classic on the order of The Moviegoer, A Fan's Notes or A Catcher in the Rye.